ORIGINAL: actrade
1. There is a vocal minority here who deem themselves the "guardians of knowledge" on the inner workings of WiTP:AE, admittedly a very complex and deep game.
Curious choice of words. An alternative term would be "an expert".
They feel they have the right to tell players, many of them new, that they don't know anything, read the manual closer and in some instances, have resulted to unprovoked insults when they just as easily could simply have chosen not to respond to these posts at all.
Making low effort or downright lazy posts and expecting others on the forum to "do your homework for you" is grounds for pushback from the community in my opinion.
Being told to read the manual is a legitimate response when the information being sought is in the manual.
Psychologists call this term a "Spring boarder," which means someone who pushes down on a spring board to elevate themselves, the person/persons put someone down in order to create themselves in the image of 'other' or 'better' than their victim.
Completely unfamiliar with this phrase, and from a quick search of academic literature "Spring board(er)" in the psychological context only seems to appear in contexts not really germane to the present discussion.
Then there is the silent majority, who simply want to play the game, engage in discussions on how to play better, understand the game better, doing what human beings do by asking questions that you find on most other forums. They haven't memorized the manual yet and don't have 10+ years of experience with the game. Go take a look at the WiTE2 forums, which is also a quite complex game IMHO, but is much more scalable in terms of AI assistance and less micro managing. I was quite shocked at the difference between the two boards after picking up WiTP:AE for $16 over the holidays and coming over to these forums.
Worth recognising they're significantly different games, with notable differences in approach and nearly a decade apart in terms of release. I'd also point out that the WITE titles have had a Steam release, which would suggest a much wider player base.
Based on any number of factors I'd be careful before drawing comparisons between the two.
3. Finally, you have a company who realizes things have gotten out of control and have decided to more rigorously enforce a long-existing set of standards of decorum (along with new standards) and is being vilified for doing so. The vocal minority "gatekeepers" are now threatening to leave and in some cases, highlighting their own self-importance and loss for the community if they make good on their threats. All of this smacks of classic narcissism.
See, you were close there.
Fell down the old trap of defaulting to personality characteristics.
It's going to be a fundamentally flawed approach if you're considering what is essentially intragroup conflict (and the wider group dynamics) with the lens of individual personality factors.
... outside of that, I've been a historical wargamer for zillions of years. Board games, computer games, miniatures and even role-playing.